


The Predatory Wasp is Out To Get Us

by discombobulate



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-13
Updated: 2011-08-13
Packaged: 2017-10-22 14:28:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/239047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/discombobulate/pseuds/discombobulate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Donna Noble forgets. And while she's at it, she remembers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Predatory Wasp is Out To Get Us

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first piece of writing for Doctor Who - this is unbeta'd, I'm afraid, and possibly a bit rushed at the end, but I hope you like it anyway!

Donna Temple-Noble is seventy-eight years old, tired, and bloody sick of wearing an unflattering – even for an old dodder like herself – hospital gown all the time.

So it is with relief that she uses her terminal diagnosis (cancer of the kidney, which spread like some sort of alien tentacle over the rest of her insides) to check herself into a cushy Home. It’s not Farrington Road, where she’d spent the greater part of her life, but Farrington Road stopped being home when Shaun passed.

This old folk’s home is the best deal she’s going to get, and she’s had her fun as one of the elderly masses already: yelling at the more irritating children to get off her garden, while slipping the cute ones a sweet or two, using her cane to get discounts – whether through sympathy or a sneaky whack to the ankle – but all that soured as soon as she started pissing herself in public.

So now her last days are spent scowling at the telly (how is that Jeremy Kyle prick still on ITV?) in the common room that reeks of disinfectant and urine, nattering with the ones who could talk (there’s a little old buddy who reminds her so much, too much, of her dear old granddad) and boring the pants off her grandkids.

“Don’t be daft Nan, aliens don’t exist!” Wilf exclaims, old enough to be cynical but too young to hide the curiosity when Donna tells him and his brother about the couple of decades when London would be plagued with alien invasions seemingly every Christmas (but not every Christmas, because the first few she doesn’t remember, can’t remember, even though the news reports the next morning contradicted her).

“They do,” Donna says, “And Shaun will back me up on this.”

The grandkids exchange confused glances while Lee and his wife frown at her worriedly.

“What?”

“Mum, dad passed away, remember? Five years ago?”

“Lee, what are you - “Donna snaps, before she remembers.

“Oh. Oh, yeah, ‘course I remember, love,” and the slow, smouldering ache of it doesn’t leave for a long time after her family take their leave.

*

Some days she forgets. And she knows she’s forgotten something – this isn’t a new feeling, she’s had it since she was in her thirties. It’s only gotten worse as her dementia has developed. There are fuzzy patches in her day-to-day memories, where she cannot remember the process between putting the kettle on and burning her bare toes as she spills a cup of tea.

(If you must know what happened in that fuzzy, static space of memory that Donna does not choose to forget, but must, before the migraine she has blisters her very skull; just know that she remembers a man – more a lanky streak of piss than a proper man in her opinion – and the sensation of flying in a little-big box through the galaxy.)

So she scowls and curses herself a clumsy old blighter and takes paracetamol for the lingering headache (and tries very, very hard to tell her doctor (Doctor) how she’s acquired so many burns and blisters and bruises that she can’t remember forming).

And so, the more Donna forgets, the more she can remember.

It is one September morning, the pale morning sunlight streams in through the windows, illuminating dust motes (Vashta Nerada, her mind hisses, and she avoids the shadows in her room, even after she remembers her proper life she can’t explain the sickly uneasiness the shadows strewn across the floor cause) when her first lapse happens.

(The Doctor)Donna is aware that she is seventy-eight, knows her knotted fingers are useless, knows that should her family visit that to them she will be inarticulate, mistaken for in the throes of dementia and unable to recognise them, but locked in her own mind she is wise and beautiful and quicker than just about anyone on Earth. Most of all, she knows that she will never see her Doctor again. The raw ferocity of her loneliness forces her physical body into a crumpled, sad heap of withered skin, liver spots and frumpy cardigans, unrecognisable and undistinguished from the other hunched heaps of ancient human.

Because the weather is bright and clear, she is wheeled cheerfully out into the rose garden behind the Home with a gently scolding “Come on now, dear, you need to get some air about you,” from some patronising nurse. She sits slumped in the chair, feels as though every organ enclosed in the cage of her ribs has furled and turned to lead.

She turns her watery, veined eyes away from the endless rows and columns of sun-speckled flora, stretched before her like a scenic picture from a calendar, in favour of picking at edges of the tartan blanket across her lap. Nothing from this world compares to the silvered memories she rifts through again and again like a well-thumbed book. She reminisces for as long as she’s able (and the amount of time she is able to remember her life as a time-traveller instead of her life as a human grows steadily longer every time it happens. Donna does not begrudge that.)  
That evening, after supper, it occurs to her that she does not remember anything at all from that afternoon. She glances suspiciously at the play of light and shadow streaming across her window pane, rain battering against it in the first downpour of autumn, before climbing into bed and falling asleep with her bedside lamp on.

*

“Mum, I can hardly recognise you these days,” Lee snarls, all hurt and resentment and guilt even as he says it. Privately, Donna agrees, it was only this morning – or the morning before yesterday – that she stared into the grimy visitor’s bathroom’s mirror and pulled at her papery skin and stretched her face to see if the smoothed-out wrinkles would show a glimpse of the woman she used to be (they didn’t).

But at that moment she is furious and ashamed and bloody miserable (not that that’s new, some sort of depression slid into her life like sewer water around the time she started forgetting things in her thirties), and unable to veil it as she used to be able around her son.

This particular argument stems from an incident in the local park wherein Donna, resting on a bench while Lee and Miranda herded the grandkids to and from the various swing sets and slides, was unreasonably spooked by a wasp.

Donna herself cannot explain why the sudden appearance of the translucent, glinting creature no longer than her fingernail did not merely startle her, but sent her into a full-blown panic attack. It was not merely the wasp itself, Donna knows, but the feeling of crushing devastation and fuzzy nostalgia that came with it. The image of the impossible – a gigantic wasp rising like a grotesque flower from a wooden, musty floor, beady eyes intent and dangerous as it prepared to charge – flashed before her the moment the ear-itching, incessant buzzing sounded in her ear.

So, a scene had been made, bystanders alternately turned their children away from the clearly-disturbed old woman and crouched before her, demanding to know what was wrong, was she alright, did she need an ambulance.

“Look, mum, I don’t know what happened today, but I do know that sometimes you end up... upsetting Wilf and Abigail. And – and I don’t know if I’m going to continue to let that happen,”

Donna blinks, uncomprehendingly.

“You mean you’re going to stop bringing them round?”

“No! Well. Yeah. Probably,” Lee admits haltingly.

Donna’s stomach lurches and her heart twists at the thought of it. She feels mortified and furious and incredulous. Even more so when her face crumples and she begins to cry in earnest.

“Oh, mum – no mum don’t, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it,” a strong arm wraps around her hunched shoulders and draws her close, “I was only bullying you, shh, I didn’t mean it, I just – I’m just worried about you. I’m scared.”

“So am I, love,” Donna whispers, and clutches her son’s hand tight.

*

It’s a good day.

Typical London weather, of course, biting wind and showers, greyscale buildings and streetlights blurring as far as the eye can see in the middle of the afternoon. However, Donna managed to get a little shopping done without hobbling too much; her hair has not looked thicker since she was fifty-three and she’s currently nursing a cup of tea while watching on fondly as Abigail performs in the school’s nativity with all the enthusiasm she can muster for her role as one of the shepherds. Donna grins cheekily and waves back when Abigail spots her in the audience and can’t resist throwing one stubby arm into the air to wave cheerily, even as the scene calls for her to be sombre.

As Donna walks back to Lee’s house afterwards, intending to stay overnight for Christmas, she can’t help but admire the lights as she walks there.

A simple joy lifts her heart as it hasn’t been lifted in a long time, and she walks with her back straight beneath the canopy of stars and fairy lights.

She remembers everything that happened that day.

*

Spring blooms, inevitably, as it always does. In this season of rebirth, of new life and hope and chrysalises curled like scythes, Donna lies in a hospital bed, wired up to so many machines and drips that she is barely visible.

She has suffered a stroke, and when her family visits daily her eyes show no hope or love or recognition. Each and every day she wants to peel off her own skin from boredom, trapped inside her head as the DoctorDonna.

Her breath is a reedy gasp against plastic, and she wishes she could have been more than she was. She wishes she got one life or the other – as a companion to the loneliest individual on the planet until she herself withered and turned to dust and smoke, or an ordinary life, full of pies from Gregg’s, red wine, a family, growing old and fat with Shaun without suffering that horrible depression – rather than this half-life she’s been forced to lead.

She wishes she could have seen him one last time.

Just to know he was okay.

That he found a good friend who understood him as Donna did. Who asked nothing more than the deepest of friendships, all he ever wanted.

In this stage of dementia (awareness) time moves both like molasses and at the speed of sound. She is only vaguely aware of nurses and doctors popping in every hour or so. She knows her family of her normal life visit, and she wishes she could reassure them. Unfortunately, she seemed to only be able to be fully aware in her mind. Her physical body ached, bones feeling as though they’d been dipped into the coldest sea, and the regular bleep of her heart monitor (he had two hearts, Donna could do with that, maybe with another heart she could give one to her family and one to him, instead of failing to split her only one between the two) is a four-beat rhythm, then a regular hum, like the droning of bees.

Currently, the telly that hangs from the ceiling is switched onto the News, Donna having grown increasingly irritated with Jeremy Kyle (still on, the bastard). And then –

“Breaking news – Cornwall has been invaded with extraterrestrial beings. Witnesses say they bear great similarities with the aliens who invaded London five decades ago on Christmas day – we go to the scene now. Tom?”

The television cut to a middle-aged reporter standing calm-as-you-like amidst a wave of people screaming and running.

“Yes, Diane, the disturbance was first reported last night, at approximately 2:15 AM, when a young woman called the police about hearing strange – excuse me, what on earth are you doi—“ he was cut off unceremoniously as a young man sporting a twee suit and a ridiculous bow-tie shoved him aside to stare directly into the camera.

“This thing is broadcasting to the entire country, right?” he asks, squinting and bringing his face up close enough to practically show Britain the insides of his nostrils. Donna’s weak heart nearly leapt into her mouth as the familiar buzzing of a sonic screwdriver sounded from the television.

“Yeah, but Doctor –“a young woman’s voice, tinged faintly with a Scottish accent could be heard from the background.

“Brilliant,” the man pulled back, his floppy, foppish hair and odd giraffe-like face filling the screen, “now listen to me, you lot – if you happen to come across something that looks a bit like mashed potato in a black cape, just. Run. Do not provoke it, do not interact with it, don’t even look at it if you can help it – not that that’s necessarily linked to survival that last one, it’s just a bit of a state, to be honest.”

An explosion followed by more screaming (and a curious squelching sound) could be heard in the background.

“Doctor!” the girl called urgently, and she could be seen with a pretty young man with a prominent nose pulling the Doctor (not her Doctor, but the Doctor all the same, older and wiser and not even remotely alone) backwards.

“Doctor, we need to go,” the young man frowned.

“Right, yeah, of course, just coming,” the Doctor spun in a circle and smacked himself on the forehead.

“Oh! Before I forget, I know you’re watching this,” his tone became low and serious but his smile split across his face crookedly, “And you have to know, you were brilliant. You really were. We had some adventures, and I know it’s – it’s a bit rubbish right now, but you’re about to go on the next big adventure, and it’s been a long time coming,” he pauses and the smile becomes gentler, “You were never forgotten by them. You’re a bit of a legend, as it happens.”

And he was gone. In a flurry of light and fire, the somewhat shellshocked reporter finishes his report as quickly as possible, but Donna doesn’t hear a word.

Propped up on the hospital bed, Donna brushes away tears she didn’t feel being shed, laughing as she realises that they leaked into the hollow of her ears. And she doesn’t stop laughing.

It’s possible, in the grand scheme of things, that the Doctor (who is alive and new and old and happier than she’s ever seen) was addressing someone else entirely – he’s met and loved so many people, and so many of those people touched the lives of those living amongst the stars, but for today, Donna decides she’s tired of doubting everything she sees.

“Still as thin as a bleedin’ rake!” she crows into the air. Howling now, with sheer happiness, she turns off her television with a trembling hand and sinks back into her pillows.

She lifts a photo of Shaun that rests on her bedside table, and presses her pruned lips to the glass of the frame.

Donna Noble, the most important person in the universe, awakes only once more before the darkness takes her gently away – and she spends her lucid moments (lucid in body and mind for the last time) sharing stories of the adventures of her and her best friend in the entire universe with her grandkids.

They didn’t believe a single word of it. And Donna was perfectly alright with that.


End file.
